1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a signal processing method and a related signal processing apparatus, and more particularly, to a signal processing method and a related apparatus for utilizing a combined odd and even field SYNC data to train coefficients of an equalizer or to estimate a channel.
2. Description of the Prior Art
With the coming of the digital era, television broadcasting has gradually transformed from conventional analog systems into digital systems. Present digital television broadcasting formats include the Advanced Television Systems Committee (ATSC) format in the United States, the Digital Video Broadcasting-Terrestrial (DVB-T) format in Europe, and the Integrated Services Digital Broadcasting-Terrestrial (ISDB-T) format in Japan.
As the signals received by the broadcasting signal receiver may be disturbed during transmission, it may not accurately represent the originally transmitted signals. The modulation subsystem of the existing digital television broadcasting system in the United States offers two modes being based on vestigial sideband (VBS) modulation: an 8-VSB mode for terrestrial broadcast, and a 16-VSB mode for high data rates such as cable applications. In terrestrial broadcasting signals (also known as ATSC signals or 8-VSB signals), the transmitter will regularly send out known field SYNC data, which consists of a training sequence used for training coefficients of an equalizer.
It is a common practice in the prior art to train the coefficients of the equalizer whenever each field SYNC data arrives. Or a single field SYNC data is repeated for several times, and then the repeated field SYNC data is used for training the coefficients of the equalizer in order to achieve a goal of fast convergence. However, the terrestrial broadcasting signals transmit the odd field SYNC data or the even field SYNC data alternately, wherein the difference between them is that a certain pseudo-random sequence is inverted. For this reason, whether this certain pseudo-random sequence among each field SYNC data is inverted must be determined first, and then the follow-up action of training the coefficients of the equalizer can be performed. Furthermore, the remaining data other than the field SYNC data among the terrestrial broadcasting signals often interferes with the result of training the coefficients of the equalizer.